Creating Cartoon Characters in MODO and ZBrush

MODO and ZBrush together form a powerful suite for creating cartoon characters. Learn how to create one from scratch, going through sculpting, retopology, UVs, texturing, lighting, shading, and rendering. Software required: MODO and ZBrush.

Course info

Rating

(11)

Level

Intermediate

Updated

Sep 12, 2016

Duration

4h 27m

Description

Creating a cartoon character from scratch in 3D can be a difficult task. In this course, Creating Cartoon Characters in MODO and ZBrush, you will learn to do just that while creating your own cat-like charismatic character. First, you will learn how to start sculpting the model in ZBrush using Dynamesh and powerful modeling techniques. Next, you will go through all the steps needed to create efficient topology and UV maps in MODO. Finally, you will render a complete cartoon character with custom textures, surface details, and shaders with your own lighting setup in MODO. When you're finished with this course, you'll not only have a cool cartoon character in your hands, but you'll also have learned important 3D production skills that improve any creative workflow. Software required: MODO and ZBrush.

About the author

José Caetano de Campos Silva is a 3D artist from São Paulo, Brazil. He has been working as a 3D generalist in advertising illustration for over 10 years now.

Section Introduction Transcripts

Section Introduction Transcripts

Course OverviewHi, everyone! My name is Caetano Silva, and welcome to my course, Creating Cartoon Characters in MODO and Zbrush. I am a 3D Illustrator at Un Mariachi 3D Studio. MODO is a very complete and versatile 3D application, and together with ZBrush allows for an easy, fast, and powerful character creation suite. In this course, we are going to learn how to create a cartoon character from scratch using these two softwares. And in the process, also learn how to make them work together flawlessly. Some of the major topics that we will cover include sculpting character sketches in ZBrush, how to make the retopology and UV mapping of our character, painting and detailing the model in ZBrush, and also lighting, shading, and rendering in MODO. By the end of this course, you'll know how to create your own cartoon characters using these two powerful tools. All the way from the sketch phase up to the final render. Before beginning the course, you should be familiar with the very basics of MODO and ZBrush. I hope you join me on this journey to create our own charismatic cartoon character with the Creating Cartoon Characters in MODO and ZBrush course at Pluralsight.

Sketch out the Character in ZBrushHello everyone, I'm Caetano Silva and today, on this course, I'll be showing you how to create a cartoon character from scratch, using ZBrush and MODO. This is the sketch reference we will be following throughout this first module, which includes our modeling in ZBrush and from this sketch, we will proceed to the other parts in the other modules, which includes retopology, UV opening, texturing, detailing, posing, and then shading, lighting and rendering. And in the end of this course, we'll have a complete character and this character can be used for animation, for illustration, or anything else you might have a use for. And throughout the course, also, some of the information I'll be sharing with you guys can also be used on other areas of CGI as well. So, let's not waste any more time, Let's get to ZBrush and start modeling.

Retopology in MODOSo in the last module, I showed you guys how to reach this model here we made together on ZBrush. This is going to be our final sketch and we are going to export this model to Modo and start working on our retopology for the character. A good topology is very important for any kind of character even if you're not going to animate it because it allows us to have the best kind of deformations on the mesh of the character, a more natural kind of deformation, should it be for doing different expressions or different poses and it also helps us extract the best UV maps possible with the best seams on the maps with a lot less work involved. So I'm going to show you how to extract the best topology from this model and the first step we need to take is to export this to Modo. Let me show you on the next clip how to do this very quickly.

Exporting the Model to MODOOkay so now we have our finished character in Zbrush and we wanted to go back to Modo so we can shade it, and light it and render it and we are just going to use a very useful Zplugin again, and this time we'll use multi map exporter here. And this we'll export all of our maps; displacement, normal maps, texture map and our actual mesh at once, and to our designated folder so we can easily come back to Modo and load them up real quick. So we are just going to be using displacement in normal for the body and the t-shirt. Because we didn't do any deformations the require displacement in the teeth. Yeah I think we did to the tongue, let me make sure, yeah the tongue as well we'll need some displacement for that but other than that the eyes, and the teeth, and the claws don't need maps they just need the mesh to work correctly. So in the next clip I'll get started with you to show how to use Modo map exporter and we'll have this model in Modo in no time. So let's get started.